Cripes! I don’t know how you are with heights, but you wouldn’t catch me leaning over that scaffolding, staring into dizzying oblivion a couple of hundred feet below...

This dramatic photograph was taken almost 50 years ago, in June 1968, from the top of the spire of St Peter’s Church, Highfields, Leicester.

It provides us with a unique view that will never be repeated – unless you’ve got a drone, I suppose – as the spire and its tower are no longer with us.

The view from the sandstone spire – which does look very weather-worn – looks up Highfield Street. The first junction is with Severn Street, the flat-roofed community hall on the corner replacing some Blitz-damaged housing.

Next, the distinctive copper dome of the synagogue on the corner of Upper Tichborne Street can be seen, while in the distance, on the other side of London Road, the recently-constructed Charles Wilson building of Leicester University.

Notice the dramatic lack of nose-to-tail car parking and traffic - somehow, we managed to exist without so many cars back then...

My second photo, above, shows a fuller view of the tower, when it had its spire, in March 1968, just before the spire’s demolition, taken by reader Horace Gamble, of Ratby.

It was taken just before the scaffolding was erected in preparation for the gradual dismantling of the spire, which, presumably, was unsafe or too expensive to restore.

The weather-worn top of the spire may have meant it had become unsafe. I’ve always wondered why architects use sandstone in their constructions when more hardy materials exist.

Anyway, Mr Gamble said St Peter’s Church was where his mother and father were married in 1921. Horace was baptised there in 1922, confirmed there in 1935 and was minutes secretary to the church council in 1968 when the decision was reached that the spire should be removed.

He said: “The chairman, the then vicar, the Rev Wilson Carlile, when faced with the results of the obligatory regular inspection of the fabric, which had reported on its unsafe condition, considered that expensive repairs would not be everlasting and that a future church council wold be faced with an even greater expense for further restoration work.

“After much discussion, the council voted in favour of applying for the necessary faculty required for the legal removal of the spire, which was duly carried out in 1968, some 90 years after the completion of the church building.

“The gentleman on the scaffolding – which would not conform to today’s building regulations! – was not Mr Carlile.”

St Peter’s was the only church in Leicestershire, other than the small village church in Blaston, that was designed by the great Victorian architect George Edmund Street.

It was built as a memorial to one of Leicestershire’s greatest patrons of church building and restoration, Earl Howe of Gopsall Hall, and the then fashionable district of Highfields was chosen.

For many years St Peter’s was one of the most important churches in the city and had a several clergy to minister to the vast congregation drawn from the densely-populated surrounding area. It also houses a magnificent four-manual organ by the distinguished firm of Taylor of Leicester.

Happily the church, with attractive internal adaptation, continues into the 21st century.